venerdì 26 agosto 2016

1 YOU ARE THE 1%

When the Occupy Wall Street movement gained traction in late 2011, disaffected citizens of the Western world quickly adopted the term ‘the 1%’ to refer to the top 1% of income earners in wealthy nations, primarily the United States.Read more at location 387

These facts can lead those of us who aren’t in that 1% to feel powerless, but this focus on the top income earners in the United States neglects just how much power almost any member of an affluent country has. If people focus exclusively on American inequality, they’re missing an important part of the bigger picture.Read more at location 395

If you earn above $52,000 (£34,000) per year, then, speaking globally, you are part of the 1%. If you earn at least $28,000 (£18,200) – that’s the typical income for working individuals in the US – you’re in the richest 5% of the world’s population. Even someone living below the US poverty line, earning just $11,000 (£7,000) per year, is still richer than 85% of people in the world.Read more at location 411

Sure,’ you might say, ‘the poor in developing countries might not have much money, but that money can pay for so much more because the cost of living in those places is cheaper.’Read more at location 418

You might assume that ‘$1.50/day’ means that every day the extreme poor live on the equivalent of $1.50 in their local currency. But it actually means they live on an amount of money equivalent to what $1.50 could buy in the US in 2014. What can $1.50 buy you in the United States? A candy bar? A bag of rice?Read more at location 424

You might wonder how anyone can live on so little money. Surely they’d die? And the answer is … they do. At least, they die much more regularly than those of us who live in developed countries.Read more at location 430

In the US, because there is no extreme poverty, there is no market for extremely cheap goods. The lowest quality rice you can buy in the US is far better than what you could buy in Ethiopia or India.Read more at location 439

Because we are comparatively so rich, the amount by which we can benefit others is vastly greater than the amount by which we can benefit ourselves. We can therefore do a huge amount of good at relatively little real cost.Read more at location 445

we make ourselves $1 poorer and thereby make an Indian farmer living in extreme poverty $1 richer. How much more would that $1 benefit the poor Indian farmer than ourselves? It’s a basic rule of economics that money is less valuable to you the more you have of it.Read more at location 448

For someone earning $1,000 per year, a $1,000 pay rise generates the same increase in happiness as a $2,000 pay rise for someone earning $2,000 per year, or an $80,000 pay rise for someone already earning $80,000 per year.Read more at location 463

from the evolution of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago until the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago – the average income across all countries was the equivalent of $2 per day or less.Read more at location 491

Sometimes we look at the size of the problems in the world and think, ‘Anything I do would be just a drop in the bucket. So why bother?’ But, in light of the research shown in these graphs, that reasoning doesn’t make any sense.Read more at location 497